News

04-05 April 2008: Register

  • Scotland on Rails 2009

    2 Jul 2008

    Scotland on Rails 2009 will be on March 26 to March 28. Same place, same atmosphere. Stay tuned for more news.

  • The party's over

    8 Apr 2008

    Until next time, anyway. And didn’t it go well? The feedback we’ve received is overwhelmingly that the Scotland on Rails 2008 was a success. It’s a bit unfair that we, the organisers, have received a lot of praise. We just booked the room: what really makes a conference are the speakers and the delegates. The quality of the talks was outstanding, and the delegates were friendly and engaged.

    We had a great time. If you came, thanks for making the conference.

  • Directions to the conference

    31 Mar 2008

    We’ve just updated the location page with details on how to get to the conference.

    http://scotlandonrails.com/location

  • Registration for the main conference has closed

    26 Mar 2008

    Thanks to all our attendees, there’s going to be more than 100 people gathered on April 4/5.

    If you didn’t make it in time, there’s still room to come and meet the speakers at the charity day

    Otherwise, see you next year !

  • Thank You!

    24 Mar 2008

    A big thanks to Guy Mortenson, who just broke us through a thousand pounds for the charity tutorial,

    Thanks from us, and from CHAS, to all the speakers for donating their time, and the attendees for giving so generously.

    You can see the list of donations at justgiving.com

  • Registration closes tomorrow

    24 Mar 2008

    We’re approaching our drop dead dates for the venue, so we’ve switched off the ‘pay later’ option and will accept paid attendees for only another day or so. We now have over 100 people coming, so will only be able to accept a few more. Get in soon if you still want to attend.

    There is, however, still plenty space for the charity day (which is a little disappointing). If you’re keen to be involved, and meet Jim Weirich, Bruce Williams, Giles Bowkett and Joe O’Brien come along for a days Ruby and Rails for only 75UKP (all of which goes to charity ). Sign up at justgiving.com

  • Newbie on Rails

    20 Mar 2008

    There’s a bunch of things in Edinburgh, for those new to Ruby and Rails in the week running up to the conference.

    BCS Ruby on Rails Professional Awareness Course – 28 March

    The British Computer Society is running a one day introduction to Rails course on Friday 28 March. The course costs £125 for non-BCS members (£110 for members), and now includes a £25 discount on Scotland on Rails registration. Details are here.

    Scotland on Rails Charity Tutorial

    Of course there’s the Scotland on Rails Charity Tutorial, where you can learn about Ruby and Rails from some of the top people in the community – tutors are Jim Weirich, Joe O’Brien, Bruce Williams, Giles Bowkett, and Craig Webster. To register all you need to do is donate £75 to the Children’s Hospice Association Scotland at this page.

    Scotland on Rails Conference

    Attending the conference is a great way to get a feel for how Ruby and Rails can help you. Hang out with Rails developers from around the world, and listen to talks ranging from experience in adopting to Rails to the cutting edge of coding and test/behaviour driven development.

    And don’t forget that conference attendees are eligible for a 15% discount on Skillsmatter Ruby on Rails Courses booked before October 4.

  • Bonus Erlang Session

    19 Mar 2008

    At the last minute we’ve added a session from Gordon Guthrie on Erlang, which has been gaining traction in Ruby circles.

    Erlang is a functional language, and we’ve scheduled the talk opposite Steven Baker’s talk on OO Design. Objects or Functions, the choice is yours !

  • Charity Day Progress

    18 Mar 2008

    So far we’ve raised 825 pounds for the Childrens Hospice Association Thanks to everyone who’s signed up for the Charity Tutorial Guidebook day.

    If you haven’t sign up yet, and are keen to come, just head on over to http://justgiving.com/scotlandonrails and make a minimum 75UKP donation for the day. You don’t have to sign up for the conference to come to the charity day, just make your donation at justgiving and mail conference@scotlandonrails.com to let us know you’re coming.

    Bruce Williams, Craig Webster, Joe O’Brien and Giles Bowkett (along with a few other informal speakers) have all donated their time for free, and the venue costs are being met by us and SkillsMatter. A small donation to the Childrens Hospice Association for a full days flexible access to Ruby and Rails training ? Seems like a good deal!

  • Free Scotland on Rails Ticket

    17 Mar 2008

    Scotland on Rails Sponsor, Morph Labs are giving away a free Scotland on Rails Ticket.

    In order to qualify for the draw, you need to sign up to the Morph Exchange Newsletter between 17th and 22 March.

    Good luck!

  • Final Payment Dates Approaching.

    17 Mar 2008

    Shirts have been ordered, so that option’s been removed from the registration form…from now on you’ll just have to take what’s left, I’m afraid :-)

    Food has to be ordered by March 25th so that’s the drop dead date for pending registrations. If you have registered, but not paid, you need to get the money in, or give us a really convincing story by that date. All pending registrations will be deleted on tha date and there’s a good chance well close the door to further registrations.

    Sorry folks, cashflow is an issue.

  • More on the Google Group *sigh*

    14 Mar 2008

    So it looks lime Google have turned my ‘auto-join’ into an invite send which means I now have to deal with 80-odd membership approvals.

    sigh Why is life never simple.

    Thanks Google. Bear with us folks if this involves a bit of faffing around on you, or our parts.

    Resolution: next years conference will do as much in house as possible. No to PayPal, No to Google Groups. No to hosted “solutions”.

  • Google Group

    13 Mar 2008

    Okay, nobody panic. It looks like Google have delayed sending the invites out while they spam-verify me (adding 70-odd people seemed suspicious).

    No-one will have recieved an invite yet.

    Sorry!

  • Google Group created

    13 Mar 2008

    I’ve created a Google Group for the conference. It seemd a good way to communicate with the paid attendees and speakers about anything happening in the next 2-3 weeks. I also hope it will be useful after the conference for feedback etc.

    I took the liberty of automatically adding all paid attendees and all speakers to the list and you should have received a notification in the last 12-24 hours.

    If you’ve paid, or are speaking, but haven’t received it, please check your spam filters, and then mail me at alancfrancis at scotland on rails dot com and I’ll get you added.

    In other news, we’re making a small number of student discount tickets available and have distributed a coupon code through a few university contacts.

    If you haven’t seen it yet, and are interested, please mail conference@scotlandonrails.com from your university/college email account and we’ll send you the coupon code. There are limited numbers and the system will auto-expire the coupn when we reach a certain number of paid student delegates. If you have registered and not yet paid, your place is still at risk.

    3 weeks to go.

  • Accommodation tips posted

    12 Mar 2008

    We’ve added some tips on booking your accommodation to our location page.

  • The Draft Schedule is Available !!!

    10 Mar 2008

    The schedule is now available for your perusal. Details are subject to change, but the basic start and end times are reliable.

    In some places, we moved to two tracks, in others it’s a single ‘plenary’ type arrangement. Hopefully that’s clear enough.

    The tutorial day is deliberately ‘slack’ as we are expecting some surprise additional guests depending on which speakers are free.

    We’re absolutrely amazed at the quality and variety of speakers we’ve been able to attract to the first Scotland on Rails conference.

    Thanks to all our speakers, sponsors and attendees… we think this is going to be amazing!

  • An Update

    10 Mar 2008

    Apologies for the delay. We’ve been making a schedule and hopefully it’ll be up on the site today or tomorrow.

    Some folks have been asking for some basics so they can book travel plans.

    We’re looking at 9-5 for the Charity Day on Thursday, kicking off with registration between 8 and 9 on Friday morning, and closing at 5ish on Saturday evening. The detailed schedule will be up asap. Thanks for your patience!

    On another note, we’ve had many people express an interest in the charity day, but not so many donations yet. Hopefully now that the details have been posted, we’ll start to see people committing. :-) There are also a few delegates who are still marked as pending (ie haven’t paid yet). These places are at risk as we approach the conference. If we hit the delegate limit, we’ll have to start bumping ‘pending’ delegates in favour of ‘paid’ ones. Please get in touch with finance (at) scotlandonrails.com if you haven’t yet paid, and haven’t received a money request via paypal.

    Lastly, we’re hopefully going to be able to announce another late addition to the speakers roster. Nothing definite yet, but we’re pretty excited at the possibility. Stay Tuned!

  • Charity Tutorial Details

    9 Mar 2008

    We’ve posted details of the Charity Tutorial event here. The day, aimed at those new to Ruby and/or Rails, will take place the day before the conference – Thursday 3 April.

    Special thanks to Jim Weirich, Joe O’Brien, Bruce Williams, Giles Bowkett, and Craig Webster for giving up their time to teach the event. Also thanks go to Skills Matter for helping with the cost of room hire.

  • MorphExchange are a Silver Sponsor !

    8 Mar 2008

    We’ve just added MorphExchange as a SIlver sponsor for the 2008 conference. Thanks, folks. Your support is greatly appreciated by us, and will be by the delegates as we can probably bump the lunch budget up a bit :-)

  • O'Reilly Books - 35% Discount for delegates

    5 Mar 2008

    O’Reilly will be running a stand at the conference offering delegates a third off RRP of a variety of O’Reilly and Pragmatic Bookshelf titles. In addition, they’re providing 10 books we can auction off for the charity of choice – chas.org.uk

    Thanks to O’Reilly for their support of the conference.

    If you buy enough books, you’ve made back the cost of the conference !

  • Skills Matter Course Discount

    5 Mar 2008

    We’re really happy announce a joint operation with SkillsMatter

    SkillsMatter are offering all Scotland on Rails delegates 15% off any course in their Ruby on Rails curriculum! The delegate pack will contain a voucher code (for use before 4th October) valid against any of SkillsMatters Ruby courses.

    Thanks to SkillsMatter for their support on the conference!

  • Thomas Enebo

    1 Mar 2008

    Other JRuby lead, Thomas Enebo will be joining Charles Nutter at Scotland on Rails presenting JRuby on Rails: up and Running.

    With a speaker list includes Charles Nutter, Thomas Enebo, Michael Koziarksi , Davd A Black, Jim Weirich, Giles Bowkett, Bruce Williams, and many more, I’m gald I’m not missing the conference. Have you ensured your place?

  • Charles Nutter

    28 Feb 2008

    I’m really excited to announce that JRuby core developer Charles Nutter will be giving an in-depth technical session at Scotland on Rails:

    JRuby on Rails: Up And Running!

    JRuby 1.1 has been released, and is becoming the Rails platform of choice for many Rails shops. In this session, we’ll show how to start from scratch or migrate your existing Rails app to JRuby. We’ll demonstrate the various deployment options on JRuby. We’ll show how to integrate Java libraries into your app. We’ll walk through NetBeans’ Ruby and Rails support and talk about how JRuby has enabled better tools and better solutions for Ruby developers. And we’ll have a conversation with the audience about where JRuby on Rails should go from here. Be prepared to talk shop and see lots of code and demos.

  • Wow!

    20 Feb 2008

    A huge thanks to all of you who’ve registered for the conference already…from Scotland, Europe, the US and even South Africa! For a local conference we’re surprised at how we’re managing to attract speakers and delegates from around the world.

    We’re looking forward to seeing you all in April!

  • A Payment update

    15 Feb 2008

    Thanks to the many of you who have already registered for the conference. Anyone who’s selected the ‘pay later’ option, or who was unable to complete the transaction through PayPal this update’s for you.

    Early next week, we’ll do a sweep of registered, but unpaid attendees. You will each receive a ‘Request for Money’ from PayPal. This request for money allows you to enter a credit card directly, without creating a PayPal account.

    That probably cuts out a large percentage of those who have been unable to pay so far. For the few remaining individuals who require something more convoluted – purchase orders, invoices, cheques in the mail etc, we’ll do our best to accommodate you.

    Please note, however, that we are unable to confirm your attendance or registration before we have received the funds. A credit card will be the fastest way to achieve this, as the other process can take considerable time, so please consider using a card and claiming it back from your employer (if necessary)..

  • Pay Later option added for Registration.

    15 Feb 2008

    If you elect to register, but pay later, we’ll mail you with a request for money (we can get a CC payment without a paypal account over email) or you can send a cheque :-)

    Phew.

    I thought taking the payment would be the easy bit of organising the conference :-)

  • Registration Opens with a Whimper, not a Bang!

    14 Feb 2008

    Well, the PayPal shenanigans continue. Due to some apparent differences between UK and US PayPal accounts, the ‘I don’t want a PayPal Account, just let me type in my card details’ option doesn’t appear to available to us.

    So right now, you can register at http://scotlandonrails.com/register, but only if you have (or are prepared to open) a PayPal account.

    Now, if you fill in the registration form and click the submit button, but cancel out of PayPal and return, we’ll still have stored your details and can get in touch with you to provide some other form of payment, it just doesn’t look very nice as you’re taken back to the registration form again.

    Bear with us and we’ll work around this cosmetic issue. In the meantime, if you have a PayPal account, registration is OPEN!

  • Apologies

    12 Feb 2008

    We’re really sorry about the holdup in registration for the conference. Paypal are kind of messing us about and won’t release an API key for us until they’ve re-verified a bank account. They do this verification so we can fund a paypal transaction from the account, which we have no intention of doing.

    Anyway, long story short, we can’t receive money until they’ve confirmed we can send money, so we won’t be using them next year and we’ll be online in the next couple of days (once the account is ‘verified’).

    Thanks for your continued patience.

  • Talk Details Posted

    11 Feb 2008

    We’ve put up the details of the talks accepted for Scotland on Rails.

    Schedule to follow!

  • Charity Tutorial

    11 Feb 2008

    The charity tutorial will be going ahead on Thursday 3rd April in Edinburgh. Details to follow.

    The charity who’ll be benefiting from your hard-earned cash is CHAS – The Children’s Hospice Association Scotland.

    The Children’s Hospice Association Scotland, (CHAS) provides respite care, terminal care and bereavement support to families who have a child or children who will sadly die before they reach adulthood. Rachel House in Kinross is Scotland’s first children’s hospice, opened in March 1996 and Robin House in Balloch opened in 2005.

    If you want to get a head start on before the tutorial is announced, or you’re interested in contributing but won’t make the tutorial, you can do this through the page we set up at justgiving.com/scotlandonrails.

  • More Speaker/Attendee Badges from Giles Bowkett

    8 Feb 2008

    See Giles blog

  • Conference Costs

    7 Feb 2008

    While we expect to open for registration next week, we’ve had several queries about the price of the conference. I’m happy to announce it’s going to be 180UKP (no VAT will be chargeable).

    In addition to the conference itself, the cost will cover lunch both days and a planned social dinner on the Friday night. There will, of course, be a shirt (courtesy of Bruce Williams).

    That’s two days, two tracks, and around 15 speakers including Michael Koziarski, David Black and Jim Weirich.

    The costs above will not cover the charity tutorial on Thursday. We’‘ll announce suggested donations for that, and the charities involved, as soon as we secure a venue.

    Registration soon…make sure you’re signed up on the mailing list to be notified.

  • Update - Speakers, Sponsors and Registration

    7 Feb 2008

    A quick news update. We’re in the final stages of confirming availability for another set of speakers. This will allow us to run a couple of tracks. Once we’ve confirmed availability, we’ll be able to add them to the speakers page.

    In other news, we’re also in the final stages of organising the now traditional charity tutorial on the Thursday preceding the conference (3rd April). We’ve had a few volunteers from the ranks of the speakers to be involved with this, so it may be a straight tutorial, or something else involving a few of our speakers.

    On the sponsorship front, we’re pleased to announce that EngineYard are joining JPMorganChase as a Gold sponsor of the conference. Thanks to EngineYard, and all our other sponsors.!

    Lastly, registration. The trickle of email asking when registration will open has become a bit of a deluge. We were waiting to finalise the speaker list and tutorial so people would know what they’re signing up for, and allow some time to collect sponsors so we could do the math and figure out what to charge. We’re almost there and we’re hoping that registration will open next week. We’re hoping to be able to provide some discounted accommodation for attendees as well, but may just open registration without that information ready.

    Thanks for bearing with us while we figure stuff out. We’re sure the conference will be worth it.

  • Speaker Badge

    5 Feb 2008

    One of our speakers, Giles Bowkett, put together a ‘Speaker’ badge for his blog, and has offered it up for anyone else to use.

    The badge is available at Giles’ blog – http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/

    Giles has also offered to ‘fancy’ it up a bit with our logo, so stay tuned :)

  • Gold sponsorship - JP Morgan

    3 Feb 2008

    More thanks, this time to JP Morgan for their Gold Sponsorship of the Scotland on Rails 2008 Conference.

    Information on sponsorship is here . Registration is opening soon.

  • Sun are our Platinum Sponsors

    30 Jan 2008

    We have found our Platinum Sponsor: Sun Microsystems. We are delighted to have Sun on board. Watch out for more announcements coming from this direction.

    There are still opportunites for Gold, Silver, and Bronze sponsorships. Gold sponsorship now includes a logo on the T-shirt.

    You can find sponsorship details here, or drop a line to sponsorship@scotlandonrails.com.

  • Speakers Announced

    28 Jan 2008

    We’ve published our speaker list !

    Thanks so much to everyone that submitted. Our final choice of talks was very hard, but I think we balanced local with international, famous names with new voices and different types of material.

    The full program will be up soon, but subjects covered include Ruby1.9, Test-driving Rails, Rails Patterns and code generation.

    We’ll also be opening up registration very soon! Make sure you’re signed up to the mailing list to get notified as soon as we’re available. We expect to SELL OUT.

  • CafePress Link!

    17 Jan 2008

    I discovered today that the cafepress link on the homepage hasn’t been pointing to anything! Oops! A bug on our part.

    That’s now fixed and you can go to cafepress for all your scotlandonrails related mugs, shirts and underwear. So…even if you can’t come i the end, you can share in the zeitgeist :-)

    Action shots can be submitted to conference@scotlandonrails.com and we’ll try and organise a slideshow of the best Shirt-wearing, coffee-drinking, thongs and boxer shorts for the conference.

    Bonus marks if you dress your dog or baby too!

  • Final Proposal Deadline Looming

    16 Jan 2008

    Thursday 16 Jan: only four more days until the (extended) proposal deadline. Better get those submissions in.

  • ELC sponsor Scotland On Rails

    2 Jan 2008

    Big thanks to ELC for their Silver sponsorship of Scotland on Rails Conference 2008.

    If you’re interested in sponsoring, you can find details here, or drop an email to sponsorship@scotlandonrails.com.

  • Deadline Extension :-)

    2 Jan 2008

    Well we’ve had a great bunch of submissions so far, many coming an at the last second :-) There’s been over 20 different submitters from Scotland, the UK, Europe and the US giving us around thirty different proposals to choose from.

    But there’s still time. Dec 31st was probably a bust for many of you, and so in the festive spirit we’re giving you the gift of another couple of weeks.

    Get your proposals into us by Sunday 20th January. I know there’s a few of you still planning to submit. Don’t despair! Get them in! Find out how here

    Remember, if you’ve sent a submission to submissions@scotlandonrails.com and haven’t received a little acknowledgement note, please mail me, alancfrancis at either gmail or mac dot com and I’lkl check the spam filters.

    We’re also still looking for sponsors. The PDF with details is here or you can email sponsorship@scotlandonrails.com for more info. There’s a range of options, and a bunch of ad-hoc stuff as well. We’re open to suggestions.

  • Submissions Deadline Approaching

    30 Dec 2007

    2 days left to submit! If you’ve submitted something, and haven’t received an acknowledgement, please mail me at alancfrancis (at) mac (dot) com. We seem to have some over-eager spam filters and some folks had to try again.

    Submit something! Be on the same stage as Koz, Jim Weirich and Joe O’Brien !

  • Joe O'Brien and Jim Weirich

    24 Dec 2007

    We’re please to be able to announce that we’ll be featuring a special session, called ‘The EdgeCase Dialog’ from Joe O’Brien and Jim Weirich of EdgeCase.

    We’re still not exactly sure what to expect from Joe and Jim, as his is a new kind of conference session, but’s sure to be exciting.

    Joe O’Brien is a father, speaker, author and developer. Before helping found EdgeCase, LLC, Joe was a developer with ThoughtWorks and spent much of his time working with large J2EE and .NET systems for Fortune 500 companies. He co-founded the Columbus Ruby Brigade and helped organise the Chicago Area Ruby Users Group.

    Jim Weirich has been active in the software development world for over twenty-five years, with experience that ranges from real-time data acquisition for jet engine testing to image processing and web services for the financial industry. Jim is very active in the Ruby community and has contributed to several Ruby projects, including the Rake build system and the RubyGems package software.

  • News => Twitter

    14 Dec 2007

    As we move towards the conference, we’ll be expecting to release news a bit more frequently…announcing sponsors, speakers, official see-you-jimmy etc.

    I’ve added a hook to post to our twitter channel whenever a news item is published. Hopefully this’ll provide another avenue for people looking to the their scotland-on-rails fix (what? RSS isn’t enough for you?)

  • Sponsorship details available

    11 Dec 2007

    Details of the sponsorship options are now available. Click the Find Out More option in the sidebar for a PDF sheet.

  • Another Keynote Announcement

    10 Dec 2007

    We are thrilled to announce another big-name keynote speaker:

    David A. Black

    David is a well-known and highly regarded figure in the Ruby and Rails communities, having been active in the Ruby world since 2000 and a founder member of Ruby Central.

    You may want to check out his books Ruby for Rails and Rails Routing.

  • Keynote Announcement

    29 Nov 2007

    I am jaw-droppingly excited to announce that we have a keynote speaker.

    Michael Koziarski .

    As I’m sure most of you will know that Koz is a member of the Rails Core team. Koz is also one half (along with Jamis Buck) of The Rails Way.

    Since a majority of the fledgling Ruby community in Scotland come from an extreme programming background, ‘The Rails Way’, with it’s focus on clean, well-factored, simply-designed code is a favourite site.

    We’re delighted that Koz has agreed to be part of the conference, and we hope you are too.

    p.s. You can hear Koz talk about his involvement with Rails on the Rails Podcast

  • Wiki Available

    22 Nov 2007

    There’s now an empty wiki sitting at stikipad and we’d love to hear from you. What sort of topics would you like to see covered? What questions might you like to see answered? We’ll gradually fill in some information on the programme and registration stuff, but for now, feel free to have at it.

  • Twitter Feed

    19 Nov 2007

    A Twitter feed has been created. Be sure and stay tuned to the channel. We’ll be updating it as we prepare for the conference, and beyond!

  • All systems are go again

    15 Nov 2007

    Thanks to Craig at Xeriom for getting us back on our main server (as opposed to Alan’s Mac Mini).

    Session proposals are starting to come in, but we’re on the lookout for more. If you’ve something in mind, drop us a line now with a brief outline at submissions@scotlandonrails.com.

  • Server outage

    15 Nov 2007

    We’re recovering from a server outage and emergency redeploy elsewhere. Please bear with us.

  • Call for Papers now available

    19 Oct 2007

    Scotland on Rails is now soliciting proposals for the 2008 conference.

    There are two types of proposal we’ll consider: Tutorial or Session.

    Tutorials

    Tutorials are 90 or 180min instructor-led interactive classes designed to provide participants with practical knowledge they can use right away on Ruby or Rails projects. Each tutorial covers a self-contained topic relevant to Ruby or Rails such as: testing, design, plugin development, etc. Tutorials have clear learning objectives that focus on teaching specific skills or techniques.

    Topics that represent a work-in-progress or that are still being mined for practical knowledge are not suitable for tutorials; however, please consider submitting such topics as an experience report.

    Sessions

    A 45min Session could be an experience report, a workshop, a research paper presentation, or even a hands-on coding session. Ideally we’re looking for new ideas, not previously presented elsewhere.

    How to apply

    Both types of proposal should feature a single-page overview of the tutorial or session, including the target audience, minimum or maximum sizes for audience and a speaker bio.

    Please email your submissions to submissions@scotlandonrails.com. The closing date is 31st December 2007.

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